


Places to Go and People to Be

by strix_alba



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Asexual Character, Identity Issues, Other, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-17
Updated: 2015-06-21
Packaged: 2018-04-04 02:48:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4123051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strix_alba/pseuds/strix_alba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha burned all of her old identities in order to take down SHIELD. This time around, she gets to decide who her covers are:</p><p>a.k.a. the Black Widow goes on a motorcycle tour of her adopted country, figuring out what she wants to be and how she wants to do it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the first three weeks

**Author's Note:**

> [ART by stormbrite!](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4037542) All the best things.
> 
> (The more accurate, non-punchy summary of this story is "Things happen, but don't.")
> 
> I never got around to seeing Age of Ultron so this is not compliant with that reality. It takes place before AoU anyway, but just in case there are backstory things that got revealed there. Some of Natasha's backstory - mainly her not-memories of ballet - are yoinked from Black Widow: Deadly Origin.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which people make decisions to move forwards with their lives, and Natasha skips town.

The headline stared off the page at her, smug and slick and infuriating. Who is the real Black Widow? it asked. _Inside the mind of a modern-day superspy._ Natasha glared back, quieted the alarms jangling in her bones. She noted the author of the article, stored his name away for future reference.

The article started out bland enough: the same rundown of events that she’d given the media since day zero, naming her, Steve, and Sam as the main catalysts of the SHIELD leak, plus the inevitable comparisons to Snowden. Natasha skimmed down a bit further.

“June 1989: a baby girl was born in ————-, Russia, to Maria Sergeiyovna Romanova and Alian Mikhailovich Romanov…”

—“age ten — Red Room”—

—“believed responsible for the Easter Sunday fire at the K——— Hospital in Petrograd”—

—“Files state she is also responsible for the assassination of Anatoly C———-, a minor political member of the ——— Party”—

—“first came to SHIELD’s attention in 2006” — “shadowy associate Clinton Barton, better known to the public as Hawkeye” — etc, etc.

She turned the page, and discovered a two-page spread which featured a timeline: color-coded to indicate her allegiance, arrows pointing to photos of her various aliases and descriptions of what the captions suggest were “key moments” in her career.

She supposed that it was elegant. It was certainly thorough, and mostly accurate. In its own way, it was the most unnerving thing that Natasha had seen in years.

The final page of the article analyzed her actions with regards to SHIELD, her motivation for the leak, and whether this meant that she had turned her back on the United States in favor of her mother country, or whether she and Captain America had simply decided to take justice into her own hands.

When she finished, she picked up the phone to call Clint. _Time magazine thinks I’m going to flee to Europe and go back to doing mercenary work,_ she had on the tip of her tongue, when she remembered.

She cleared his number and called Sam instead.

“It’s Nat. I’m going out,” she began without preamble. “What do you want me to get for dinner?”

“Uh…” Sam sounded startled. “I — I was gonna make some steaks while you’re both still patching yourselves up.”

“Steve heals six times faster than the average human being, and I’ve got ninety percent of my mobility back. Our iron levels are fine. Let me pick something up,” she said.

“You want to leave the house.”

Natasha’s eyes wandered back to the article, towards a photo of herself with long black hair and makeup that would make Morticia Addams proud. She’d been a secretary for the Polish Prime Minister then, until he died of a — a heart attack. She’d liked that disguise, and it had served her well, but every other person who read that article would be able to recognize the woman — the girl — in that picture as Natasha regardless of how well-hidden she had been at the time.

“Yeah, sure,” she said. “I’m not on house arrest, am I?”

He laughed. “No, you’re not. How does Chinese food sound?”

~~*~~*~~

She didn’t have any of her old disguises anymore, but Natasha still made sure to change before she left the house. She applied a liberal amount of eyeshadow and lipstick, let her hair fall over the sides of her face, and changed into clothing — a sweatshirt from Steve’s closet, skinny jeans from her own — that would keep her looking more like a hungover grad student than an assassin.

“Sam Wilson,” she murmured to the girl behind the counter. She pitched her voice higher than usual; Natasha liked the sound over her own voice, didn’t like how distinctive it could be. “I called in twenty minutes ago?”

The girl looked up from her book, nodded, and gazed at her for two seconds longer than necessary before she turned around. “Wilson! Order 2617!” she yelled.

Natasha lowered her gaze, fiddling with a straw from the countertop dispenser while she waited. The wrinkle of paper bags: the calloused hands of an older man who set down two large paper bags in front of her. The shuffle of the man’s feet came to a halt.

“She’s pretty,” the man said in gruff Cantonese. “Like that woman from the television you like. The superhero.”

Natasha fidgeted and did her absolute best impression of an exhausted and monolingual American customer.

“Okay,” said the girl at the counter.

“You should ask her for her phone number,” he continued.

“Dad.” Natasha’s gaze flickered up to the girl, wide-eyed and frowning. “Just because I’m — that’s not polite — and Dad, I think she is.” She took a deep breath and said to Natasha, in English, “Sixty-four thirty-five.”

“I’m just trying to be supportive,” the father said, while Natasha pulled cash out of the pocket of her jeans and disguised her unease by lounging against the counter while the girl counted out change. Another customer walked in, and Natasha held her breath. In accented but steady English, the father said to Natasha, “My daughter is a lesbian now. She’s a fan of yours.”

Natasha fluttered her eyes open wide, shoulders drawn together and elbows pressed against her side. “What do you mean?”

“Five sixty-five here’s your change have a nice night,” the girl at the counter said, thrusting the money into Natasha’s hands. She stared at the air over Natasha’s shoulder, flushed. “I’m sorry.”

Natasha took pity on her. She leaned in, lowered her voice. “You want to talk about frustrating parents, my father-figure didn’t even tell me he’d faked his own death,” she told the girl in Cantonese, grinning. “At least yours has realistic expectations.” The girl laughed, startled, and Natasha straightened. “Good night,” she said in English, and bolted.

The apartment had already been lit up from the inside when she got back. “Who’s there?” she called as she opened the door.

“Just me.” Steve’s voice came floating over from the couch.

Natasha frowned and deposited the paper bags on the floor. As a general rule, he never gave her a straight answer to the question: it was always “your fiance” or “who’s got two thumbs and grew up during the Depression?” or “Captain Steve Rogers, sir”. She climbed over the back of the couch to perch on the arm opposite him. “How’d it go?”

Steve shrugged, blank-faced. He looked like he could use a hug, but to do that Natasha would have to climb half into his lap and she didn’t know how he would react to that. Instead, she slid her hand down into his palm and laced her fingers through his.

“It could’ve been worse,” he said, looking down at their hands like he’s memorizing their arrangement. “A lot worse. Stark likes pretending he’s a dick enough that it’s easy to forget he isn’t.”

“Stark is still a dick,” Natasha corrected him. “He just doesn’t blow up innocent people for money anymore.”

Steve smiled. “At any rate, he’s paranoid enough that most of his stuff wasn’t on the SHIELD database we uploaded, and he’s cynical enough that he wasn’t too bothered by what we’d done once he found out why we’d done it.”

Natasha slid down onto the couch, so that she could wedge herself between his shins and the comfortably worn back cushions. “That doesn’t sound so bad. What went wrong?”

Steve sighed. “Dr. Banner. SHIELD had a lot of his work in their files. All that work is now up for anyone who can search the internet.” He gazed off at the blank television screen, worry creasing his forehead. 

Natasha suppressed her first instinct to get up immediately and add that information to her ever-growing list of classified information whose release she needed to track, because Steve was still holding her hand in a way that suggested he needed the physical contact. “Everything that SHIELD knew about the experiments with gamma radiation that turned him into the Hulk — turned part of him into the Hulk,” he pushed on, “that’s out there too.” 

It didn’t take long for Natasha to grasp the implications: renewed interest in the super serum, or even deliberate attempts by other organizations and crazed individuals to replicate the Hulk debacle. She shut her eyes, running through scenarios, kicking herself for not having thought about it earlier. HYDRA’s active projects within SHIELD were more than enough to warrant total exposure, and given the nature of the situation there hadn’t been time for a more nuanced solution, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t have momentary regrets. The key word was momentary.

She opened her eyes and squeezed Steve’s hand. “So life is going to be interesting for a while,” she said. She didn’t let her smile reach her eyes so that Steve would know she wasn’t treating this too lightly — just enough to put him at ease.

Steve huffed, eyebrows up. “And here I was, worrying that I wouldn’t know what to do with myself after … all this.”

Which was an excellent segue into Natasha asking him what he intended to do now, and she opened her mouth to do exactly that —

“So who’s this?” With his free hand, Steve gestured up and down to indicate Natasha’s outfit and makeup. “I don’t think I’ve seen her before.”

“Sammy Wilson,” she said, thinking rapidly as her voice climbed higher and lost its confidence. “Grad student. Biochemistry at Princeton, third year. I’ve got juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and slight anemia. Hauling up two bags of greasy food wasn’t so bad, I guess, but on a bad day, it’s worth the extra couple bucks to have someone deliver everything so I’ll have energy to actually eat it, you know?”

Steve looked torn between concern and amusement. Natasha grinned. “Got you.” 

He just smiled, and she felt compelled to add, “She’s no good for anything important, though. The cashier at the Chinese place saw through it.”

His posture stiffened, and he let go of her hand to push himself upright. “Did anything happen?”

“Well, her father tried to set me up with her, but nothing bad happened.” Natasha swung herself off the couch. 

“I can’t tell if that’s sweet or scary,” Steve said.

She shrugged. “The girl noticed who I was and ignored it; I think the father was just being a dad. I hope Sam isn’t too attached to that place. And speaking of Sam…” Natasha glanced at the wall clock. “I’m going to shower and get clean before he gets home. You’ll watch out?”

“Course. Anyone wants to get into the bathroom, they’ve got to get past me, first,” Steve assured her.

Natasha and Clint had a routine that they followed after a mission together: one would shower and clean themselves up while the other sat in the bathroom and worked on writing up the mission report. Then they would switch. She didn’t remember talking much during those times, aside from the occasional “What time was it when you took down the guard posted on the northeast face of the offices?” or “Is the past tense of lead spelled l-e-a-d or l-e-d?” It had been enough for Natasha just to know that someone was there, standing guard and ready to protect her. It was enough knowing that Clint would leave all of his weapons with her and trust her to do the same.

Showering at Sam’s apartment, even with Steve there, wasn’t quite the same. Steve was — well. They didn’t have the same history.

Still, some parts of the process are familiar. Removing her clothing and makeup (and sometimes her wig, and knives, and guns, and fake fingerprints) was a soothing, meditative ritual: stripping away the artifice until she was just herself, just the base components of Natalia Romanova waiting for an external force off of which to springboard a new variation. She scrubbed away every trace of Sammy Wilson under the hot water and dried herself with one of Sam’s gym towels. (She had only gone back to her apartment once after they left SHIELD, to collect her laptop, straightening iron, and the most useful array of clothing and weapons that she owned. Towels were not on her list of priorities.) She pulled on sweatpants and a cheerleading t-shirt from Agent Hill (because gifts without strings attached were rare in her life and they were a priority) and paused.

She could hear music playing outside the bathroom. Loud, awful music.

Natasha slid through the door and padded around the corner silently, holding her breath. Her stealth was rewarded by the sight of Captain America with his back to her, singing along as he arranged a dozen containers of Chinese food around three place settings on Sam’s small kitchen table.

“ _Now that I want you, now I can touch you, next to me …_ ”

“Who told you that was good music?” Natasha asked, and promptly jumped out of the way and into a fighting stance as Steve did an about face, hands curled into fists and already halfway up.

He relaxed when he saw her, hands falling at his sides. “Sorry — habit. Stark’s AI, believe it or not.”

Natasha raised her eyebrows. “JARVIS?”

“I asked him for music last time I was at the Tower. Figured it doesn’t get much more unbiased than a robot.” Steve popped the lid off a box of kung pow, examined it with polite interest, and set it in front of Sam’s place setting. “It’s been a wild ride.”

“I’ll bet.”

They lapsed into companionable silence, surrounded by wailing guitars and wailing vocals from the living room speakers. Natasha let herself go still and blank, which pleased her until she noticed Steve looking at her with something like concern. She shook herself and smiled to reassure him. Steve tipped his head back, expression wry, and she thought he might be about to say something important, but then they both heard the click of a key in the front door. 

Steve’s attention snapped towards it at once. His shoulders relaxed when Sam entered the room, mouth curved into a soft smile. Natasha dismissed the stab of jealousy in her ribs as soon as she recognized what it is. Children were possessive. Natasha was not.

Once they had arranged themselves around the table for dinner, Steve didn’t talk much. It wasn’t unusual, but Natasha thought it was suspicious anyway. He didn’t look as tortured or withdrawn as he did when he started losing himself in the past again, so she didn’t mention it to Sam. As far as Natasha could tell, he wasn’t ashamed, or disappointed in himself for whatever obscure reasons his brain could come up with, and he definitely wasn’t angry. Therefore, Natasha concluded, he would talk when he was ready to talk, which meant that she could safely devote most of her attention to Sam, asking him about his day and discussing the members of his group in a way that lets him get it off his chest without violating any confidentiality agreements.

Being Sam’s friend was a new experience for Natasha. He held the distinction of being the first acquaintance who didn’t meet her while she was acting under orders, acting as any particular version of herself. Sam knew her first as Steve’s friend Natasha, then a rogue agent trying to displace a corrupt regime of her own free will.

To be honest, Natasha wasn’t sure what to do with that. She figured that if she stuck to being Steve’s friend, she was probably in safe territory with Sam, but then he’d come out with something blindingly sincere like, “Thanks for getting food, hiding out in the bedroom doesn’t look good on you,” and Natasha wasn’t sure what to do with herself. So she deflected.

“I once spent fifty-two hours in a storage unit the size of your refrigerator,” she informed him. “Me and some water and ammo. Your apartment will never be as bad as that.”

“But that was on assignment, right?” Sam jabbed a forkful of limp broccoli in her direction. “It’s different when you’ve got orders.”

“I’ve got a mission. I’m keeping track of what people are doing with all their shiny new SHIELD intel,” she said sharply.

Sam gave her a look that said he knew what she was doing, and Natasha relaxed back into her chair, dropped her shoulders, loosened the muscles in her jaw. “We burned over a dozen deep-cover agents, and at least twenty more who were undercover in a lesser capacity, including someone I knew well. If he’s alive and safe enough to contact me, he would. So far, nothing.”

“Friend?”

“He got me out of Russia. We work well together.”

Sam nodded like he got it, as though a ten-second exchange was enough for him to comprehend the thorny knot of events and deaths and scars that defined Natasha’s relationship with Clint.

She let it be. She didn’t want to explain, and it wouldn’t hurt anyone right now for Sam to think he understood.

“You know Stark’s rebuilding his tower?”

Natasha and Sam both redirected their attention to Steve. “Yeah, of course. They started as soon as they could clear the debris,” said Natasha.

“You seen it recently?” Steve asked.

“I’ve had other things on my mind besides Tony Stark’s enormous phallic monument to himself.”

Sam snorted behind a curled hand, and Steve’s mouth twitched in a small smile before he refocused himself.

“Seems it’s not a monument to himself anymore. He’s calling it the Avengers Tower. Says he wants me to move in with him.”

Natasha blinked. She’d taken much larger surprises in stride, but she usually had her guard up when they happened. “I’m sorry, what did you just say?”

“All of us. The, uh, ‘Avengers’.” Natasha could hear the air quotes around the word.

“He knows that initiative was part of SHIELD, right? I mean, it was mostly me and Fury, but he’s got to know how that would look.”

Sam leaned forwards on his elbows. “The Avengers. That’s you two, the Hulk, Thor the god of thunder, and the guy with the exploding arrows, right? Just so I got this straight.”

“That’s us,” said Steve.

“That’d be a hell of an apartment to live in,” Sam mused.

Steve spread his hands. “Like Natasha said: the world’s going to get a lot more interesting. He thinks it’d be better to have everyone together in one of the safest buildings in America, just in case. Especially since we’re all public now, like it or not. I told him there had better be room for you, considering we’d have gotten our asses kicked without you,” he added. Sam gave him an informal salute.

“You agree with him?” asked Natasha.

“I told him I’d consider it.”

“And have you considered it?”

“I’ve got business I need to take care of before I do anything else.” Steve folded his arms across his chest and met her gaze with little of his usual mildness. “What do you think?”

Natasha tipped her head to the side. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out what ‘business’ he means, and Natasha was a genius by most definitions of the word. “It’s smart. If it stops being safe to hide, then take that visibility and make it into a weapon. It’s also stupid, calling it the Avengers Tower before he’s consulted everyone. We’d all need to be there, or else the public image of the whole team is destabilized.”

“So you’d be in?” said Steve.

She looked between him and Sam. “Like you said, business to take care of first.”

~~*~~*~~

 

“And you?” asked Nick. “You coming?” _I could use you_ , she heard.

Attention trained on him, Steve and Sam only on the fringes of her awareness, Natasha didn’t move her head to give any indication yes or no. She pressed her lips together and poured all of the respect and fondness and stubbornness that she knew into the slightest crinkle of her eyes, the slope of her shoulders. Her voice, when she spoke, was as dry as ever. “I blew all of my covers,” she answered, and he gave her a short nod. She knew that Nick Fury would understand what it meant for her. She almost thought that Steve might, too.

She kissed Steve goodbye because they would see each other soon but the man seriously lacked closure in his life, and she didn’t say goodbye to Sam because they would talk soon and he had fewer issues than Steve, and she slipped a phone number into Fury’s pocket when she hugged him, and then she left.

She estimated that she had five or six minutes more before Steve and Sam made their way back via their more roundabout route.

Natasha had nothing to gain by pretending to Fury that she wasn’t staying with Sam, or that she won’t remain in contact while he and Steve went off chasing ghosts. She supposed that it just made her feel better about everything. Secrets were safe and comforting in moderation, and it was nice to have just this one for now.

In the five minutes before they got home, Natasha took out a loan from the Bank of Steve Rogers that he kept stashed in a mattress, in a shoe box on the top shelf of the hall closet, and in a rolled-up sock in the drawer of Sam’s dresser that he claimed as his own. She left a note and a necklace as collateral. It wasn’t a lot, just enough to get her from here to the West Coast if she was careful. Steve didn’t believe in banks, and thus had well over a million dollars in Army back pay squirreled away; Natasha, on the other hand, had most of her money in bank accounts that were linked to SHIELD. He would understand, even if he might not quite understand why she couldn’t just ask him for the money. 

She made the bed next, and changed Sam’s laptop background to a photo that she got a tourist to take of the three of them at a restaurant in the West End. She took the leftover takeout from the fridge and stuck it in her duffel bag.

Then she packed the few things she still owned onto the back of her motorcycle, and Natasha headed west.  
~~*~~*~~

 

All right, so she didn’t go directly west. She drove for three hours before she got caught by commuter traffic, which is how she ended up pulling off the highway into the parking lot of the Relax Inn. She signed in as Evelyn Wright, and set up a temporary base there: securing the room and setting it up with the bed wedged in the closet. She didn’t seriously believe that she needed to make the motel sniper-proof, but she did know that she would sleep easier with windows made impossible to open without setting off the fire alarm. It was unlikely that anyone would look for her here, in a crappy motel with weekly rates and suspicious-looking stains on the rug in her room.

The first thing she did after turning on the fan in the bathroom to get rid of the lingering stink of disinfectant was get out her laptop to see if Clint had gotten back to her yet. She posted messages on every ecoterrorist forum (decided upon beforehand, on the grounds that it had absolutely nothing to do with either of them) that she had been able to find, all containing certain turns of phrase that would look innocuous to the untrained eye, but would alert a Hawkeye to her presence.

Still nothing. She posted on a couple more threads, then amused herself by sending badly acted pornography to people who were Wrong On The Internet. When she got bored of that, she finally turned to her other, trickier, mission. She sat down on the bed inside the musty closet and pulled an accordion folder out of her duffle bag, the one with the Time article clipped inside. The pockets were all half-full with papers: all the initial media coverage about the event, reactions, and some printouts, highlighted and annotated in her favorite handwriting. Everything was a bit of a mess because while she was theoretically capable of sorting files, of arranging and presenting her data in a logical way, there are much, much better uses of her specific skill set. She had Coulson’s number; she thought he would pick up if he knew it was her. But Coulson, as much as she would like to pretend otherwise, couldn’t be trusted. The SHIELD data dump cleared him of involvement in HYDRA, but the events in New York two years prior had rattled her confidence in him.

So Natasha sat down to sort the pile of information she’d gathered, ready to build the bigger picture, only to realize how many places there were to begin. She had made a list — copied it off the internet, because crowdsourcing was a wonderful dangerous thing — and collected names. She spread the papers out on the bed and across her computer screen, and wished for one of SHIELD’s setups, with a wreath of touch screens around a central console so she could tap away and move files around virtually, instead of having to push paper like some kind of peasant.

There were sixteen different women, all with her face: interpreter, diplomat, two different secretaries, ballerina, daughter of a Swedish army general, high-class escort, illegitimate granddaughter of Irina Alexandrovna, and a professional dominatrix, among others. She’d been dozens of people, but these ones were her: she had put time and effort into creating them and maintaining their lives.

(As Tatiana Georgievna, she spent a good deal of time in the company of her mark’s mother Yelena, who was convinced until her dying day that Tatiana was madly in love with her son and just as devastated by his death. Natasha used to send her letters every Christmas and Easter, postmarked from a convent in Belarus, in order to keep Tatiana’s life in order; occasionally, she visited the confused nuns who received Yelena’s responses. _You cannot know what it is to lose a child until it happens; it is unbearable,_ Yelena wrote, only a few months after Natasha had poisoned her son. _If you truly feel that this is the path that the Lord has chosen for you, then at least I thank Him that you will never have opportunity know that pain_. Natasha had thanked the nuns and burned everything she received.)

Looking down at the elegant drape of the dress last worn by her younger self, she recalled the letters for the first time in several years. She scowled.

Losing her covers was not the same thing as losing actual people who actually existed independent of her, but it still kind of hurt.

~~*~~*~~

The problem, of course, was what to do with the information once she had it all laid out. She considered the problem over a bucket of strawberries and a slushie purchased from the farmer’s stand a few miles down the road. Halfway through her makeshift dinner, something sparked in her brain, another bright idea. Natasha Romanova had a very short list of people she trusted absolutely, beginning (in alphabetical order) with Clint and ending with Sam and Steve. But she had a slightly longer list of people she trusted to be basically decent human beings, even if she wouldn’t be comfortable enough to bring down the government with them. Most of these people were with SHIELD, but there were still one or two she could call.

For her part. Ms. Potts didn’t sound horribly surprised when she picked up the phone. “Hello, Natalie. Are you calling for me or Tony?”

Natasha leaned against the windowsill and slipped on the curvy posture and sly smile that she used as Natalie, regardless of the fact that Pepper Potts couldn’t see her. “Either one. And I’m fine, thanks for asking. I have a favor to ask of you. Do you think you could help me?”

There was the slightest pause at the other end of the phone line before Ms. Potts said, “That depends on what you need.”

Natasha eyed the collage of articles and headshots tacked up onto the wall. “I think I’m having a midlife crisis.”

“No, I’m forty-five. I get to have a midlife crisis. There’s still time for you to switch careers.”

“Life expectancy of the girls in my program was fifty — most of us either died or had to be terminated before we hit retirement age,” Natasha pointed out.

Pepper hesitated only for a moment before she took it in stride. Natasha appreciated that about Pepper. “Okay, so you’re having a rough time. Are you looking for a job offer, because I have to say, given your history at Stark Industries, I don’t think we’re necessarily the best”—

“Something completely unrelated to SHIELD or SI,” Natasha interrupted her. “Which is the problem. I need time off because my boss’s boss was a Nazi and tried to kill several million people. Unfortunately, things have been … difficult lately.”

“You mean the aliens, or the Nazis, or maybe the fire-breathing nutjobs building biomechanical weapons?” Pepper asked. “We could have used you with those, by the way.”

“I was busy,” Natasha said.

“Aren’t we all.”

“If something comes up while I’m away, will there be anyone else around to handle it?”

“Listen, I won’t promise you that Iron Man can make it — that issue is complicated — but if something happens, we’ve still got Dr. Banner. Thor’s back in New Mexico. We’re interviewing Maria Hill but you and I both know that if she wants a job with Stark Industries, then she’s got one; and if she has a job with us, then she’ll know if any giant tomatoes come down from space to enslave us all.”

“I don’t think space tomatoes understand the concept of enslavement, but I’ve been wrong before,” Natasha mused.

“And if we do need someone to pull a crack team together?” Pepper asked.

“I’m keeping this phone. You can reach me here if it’s an emergency.”

Pepper paused on the other end of the line — taking notes, perhaps. “Thanks for calling, instead of just vanishing into the ether like some people when they’re having issues.”

Natasha smiled, some of the tension unknotting in her chest. “I owe you.”

“I’ll remember that,” Pepper warned her. “So, midlife crisis?” she added, shutting the door on the subject.

“Yep. I’ve already got the motorcycle. If I start dating any twenty-year-old swimsuit models, send one of your smart missiles to find me,” she said, and was rewarded with a long-suffering groan of agreement.


	2. the second three months

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Natasha tries to blend in without losing contact with her people

The first thing to go, once she left Virginia, was her hair color; she would attract much less attention without the bright red. She took a photo for posterity (and Clint, because he’d catch up to her eventually and then be wounded that she’d switched without telling him first) before she snapped on gloves and coated her hair with dark brown goo. She spent the evening with her hair in strips of aluminum foil, trawling through the internet to see how the world at large was getting on sorting through the SHIELD dump. (The answer: news networks were torn between “terrorists invaded the government and superheroes saved us” and “government employees betrayed national security”; the rest of the internet was in the midst of the kind of confusion that could topple regimes if the right strings were pulled.) There was no sign of Clint Barton.

At first, she started out simple, a patchwork of characters who she knew inside and out. In Atlanta, she let herself into the mall after hours and went scavenging through clearance for yoga pants, sports bras, and enough bobby pins and hair gel to make Cousin It envious. Not a ballerina, but an ex-gymnast trying to keep herself in shape now that she had an office job. Probably a fan of smoothies and rom-coms. She paid for a week’s stay at a motel where the roar of the interstate at the end of the block woke her up more often than not, and got up at 5am every morning to go running through Piedmont Park to see what Steve and Sam saw in the activity, hair yanked back into a ponytail that made her scalp ache when she took out the hair tie afterward.

 _How often u get hit on while ur doing laps @ mall?_ she texted Sam. _I want a baseline._

 _Once or twice a month_ , he replied, and then, _running?_

Natasha shrugged at her phone, looked up, and sidestepped a woman with three small children bouncing at her side along the street. _Just keeping my options open._

~~*~~*~~

So being a smoothie-drinking fitness nut probably wasn’t going to be a good long-term gig, especially not with the price of smoothies these days. Fine. Natasha made a note of it in her file and hit the road again; over the course of the next day, she decided that she did enjoy plowing her way through the pollen-and-diesel-scented air on the seemingly endless flat highway that stretched between Atlanta and Memphis.

None of Natasha’s aliases would have ever visited Memphis, she was sure of that: too far inland and not enough absurdly rich people to play with. She checked into a motel as Florence Morse instead, grabbed a couple of brochures, and followed the chaotic percussive beats weaving through the avenues until she ended up at a tent-covered park full of live music and barbecue and smoke. She wandered around eating free samples of everything she could find until she started to feel nauseous, and then bought a bag of chicken wings from a very large, round-faced man and used the bag to collect more samples without getting grease on the inside of the (enormous, shiny) purse that she thought someone Florence Morse would have. In a dark blue bar with awful acoustics on Beale Street, she told the old man sitting on the barstool next to her who smelled like shirley temples that she was heading to Nashville to make her fortune singing country. He told her that he knew some people in the business, she should come back with him so he could introduce her. Natasha winked at the bartender, followed the man out of the bar, and broke his wrist when he tried to put an arm around her waist.

“Get away from me, you creep!” she shrieked, backing away from him in high heels she borrowed from a house with an open window along the way. “Ugh!” She spun around to face a gaggle of baby-faced twenty-somethings in the earlier stages of a bar crawl, from the look of it. “Did you see that?” she demanded, driving her voice ever higher and more shrill.

The man behind her swore some more. One of the girls on the street reached out for her. “Are you okay? Do you want to come with us?” she asked.

Natasha took half a second to calculate the odds of this being a useful adventure versus the cost of drinks and how much sleep she wanted that night. Then she gave the girl a delighted smile and took the proffered hand, careful to wobble a little in her heels without actually twisting her ankle. “Just for a little bit,” she said. “Thank you _so_ much. I don’t know what I’d have done if there wasn’t anyone around.”

~~*~~*~~

She woke up the next day with a headache as the alcohol continued to work its way out of her system; and when she checked her phone, she had half a dozen new contacts and a smattering of _hi, it’s danica!_ and _IT’S COLE WATUP_ texts that slowly brought back memories from the previous night. Natasha stared at them for a few minutes, giving herself time to process the syntax before she responded.

 _do this often?_ she asked the girl who had invited her in.

 _happy birthday to me,_ was the response, which meant nothing to Natasha.

Natasha frowned at her phone for a little while longer. She had met some of her favorite people under strange circumstances, and she knew better than most how well shared traumatic experiences could force the quick formation of close bonds. It worked to her advantage before; but she wasn’t sure if bar-hopping with a group of medical students who thought that she was studying the effects of … what had she said … body stances in intergenerational conversations, had they really believed that? Anyway, she wasn’t sure if being drunk together counted as a shared traumatic experience.

Well, she was here to figure out what sort of people she could be, wasn’t she? Natasha rolled out of bed and into a somersault that ended with her butt on the floor instead of her feet. She shrugged off the humiliating sting of defeat by gravity and typed up a response to her new acquaintance.

 _brunch?_ she asked.

~~*~~*~~

Three hours and two stacks of pancakes later, Natasha had determined that yes; apparently she was now best friends with not just the girl named Danica, but also half a dozen of her friends. They surrounded Natasha with laughter and occasional squelching noises when their legs stuck to the tacky vinyl of a pancake house booth, telling her stories of their adventures that mostly seemed to involve trespassing on private property and exploring abandoned barns. Natasha felt the weight of her past cloaking her, keeping her from sharing in their easy superficial chatter no matter how much she enjoyed listening; and she made up a half-true story about finding an old army bunker while on a mapping project, how it was full of ancient computers covered in layers of dust that looked like something from an old spy movie. She didn’t answer more questions about it, and it wasn’t the same as swapping stories with other field agents, but she felt the weight lift, just a little bit, before she left Memphis.

~~*~~*~~

On a whim, she turned back west and actually went to Nashville, on the grounds that there was no harm in seeing how much of an impression she could make as an overconfident city girl trying to sing about mudding and squirrel hunting. Ultimately, she decided that the performing arts were not in her future. Pissing off crowds of drunk people without letting anyone laying a finger on her, on the other hand …

…that, it turned out, was just one of her many undiscovered talents.

~~*~~*~~

When Natasha got bored (never lonely, she had enough pride that she would never cop to being lonely) she called Steve. He didn’t always pick up, would text her an apology later; so the first time that she actually got to talk to him after she left, she was fixing the roof of an old woman with three cats and more vodka than she knew what to do with on her own. Shingling had turned out to be one of the things that fifteen years of brutal KGB training hadn’t prepared her for, so Natasha took a break before she broke something irreparable, leaning against the chimney and stroking the cat that had somehow made its way up to watch her work. And then she called Steve, because she definitely wasn’t frustrated by not immediately mastering the fine art of the hammer and nail.

“How are you? Did you find yourself yet?” he asked, as soon as they’d exchanged pleasantries. “Not that I’m — not that I want to push you.”

Natasha ignored _that_ whopper. “I met a woman in town yesterday whose roof is falling apart. She’s paying me with cabbage rolls and letting me use her laundry machine.”

“Do people do that very often? It seems like everyone’s got to fill out all the paperwork before they do anything these days, go through all the official routes.” He sounded, briefly, sad and young. (Natasha had once calculated that they were about the same age, in terms of time spent awake and conscious. It made her uncomfortable approximately half of the time.)

“I don’t know. I’m in a pretty rural area; it’s easier to get by unofficially here. And she’s from the same province as I grew up in. Which is good, because I have no idea how to repair anything,” Natasha confided. “My area is breaking things.”

“So you’re trading goodwill for lies,” he said, laughing.

Natasha looked down at the cat in her lap, who gave her a baleful stare until she started petting it again. “You’ve caught me. I hear the internet’s good for looking things up, though. Maybe I’ll give that a try.” She hoped that her new friend wasn’t listening. Something curdled in her stomach at the thought of being found out for a fraud, a fake roof-repairwoman, in a way that being booed off of a stage hadn’t. It unsettled her, but she didn’t want to ruin the mood, so she changed the subject to safer ground. “Did you call Sharon yet?” she asked.

He snorted inelegantly. “I’m in Alaska, Natasha. Not really a good time to ask anyone out for drinks.”

“When you get back, yeah?” The cat started to purr in her lap.

“I think you get a sick thrill out of watching me not be good at this.”

Natasha examined her motives, decided that he was only partially correct, and forged ahead. “She’s nice. And she’s not going to try to kill you. She can, but she won’t.”

Steve laughed. “Is that the only criteria for the women you suggest?”

“What? Nothing wrong with having standards. Anyway, Lauren from Human Resources couldn’t kill you if her life depended on it.”

“I dunno. Did you hear her going off on Minamoto after that mission in Lagos?”

“Clint and I were wandering around the eastern half of Ukraine for the whole thing, I only got back after the inquiry finished.” She almost added “poor guy” to the end of the sentence; but decided that even if it was the right thing to say, she didn’t actually feel like feigning pity for the idiot, so she didn’t.

“Right, right,” said Steve, oblivious to the debate going on in her head.

“Seriously,” Natasha said. “How many friends do you have? Besides me and Sam. It wouldn’t kill you to see other people. Look at me, I’m taking my own advice. You have no excuse.”

Steve sighed. “It looks like he left Anchorage about a week ago. I’m hoping he hasn’t gone much further west.”

Natasha let it drop, but she made sure to infuse her words with disapproval. “What did you find?”

“Dead bodies, mostly. It almost seems like he’s leaving a mess on purpose, to slow us down. We’ll be sticking around a couple more days, figure out who these people were and why he thought they deserved to die.”

“Fun.” It sounded like the work that Natasha got to leave to Coulson. She would read files already assembled, didn’t need to ask most of the hard questions about the mission. 

“It’s better than running around like a headless chicken, or not doing anything at all,” Steve pointed out.

“You’re the boss, Captain. Put Sam on the phone, will you? I want to talk to someone my own age.”

“You’re hilarious. Listen …” There was a heavy pause. Natasha started to chew on her thumbnail, realized what she was doing, and made a face. “You’re taking care of yourself, right?” Steve asked.

She looked around at the patchy yard spread out below her, at the fenced-in grass next door where two big yellow dogs chased each other around and over and under the rusty swing set. Across the street, a man whose beer gut hung out from under his shirt hauled another piece of furniture out into the side yard and dumped it onto the dirt. “I am,” she decided, smiling so he could hear it in her voice. “Eating three square meals a day and everything.”

“Doing any spying?” he asked, casually, like she wouldn’t guess that he’d been waiting to ask her as innocuously as possible for the whole conversation.

“I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you,” she intoned, but there was only so much needling that Steve could take before he got truly irritated, so she added, “I’m only spying on myself.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Call me if you need anything?”

Natasha glanced at the shingles that she had laid down so far: she’d probably rip up the first half-dozen or so once she got back to them, even though they became steadier the closer they got to her current position. “Say, Captain, what do you know about roof repair?” she asked.

“It involves … not making holes in the roof? You know what, Sam’s making faces at me. Here you go, you big lump,” he said, and Natasha tucked the phone between her ear and her shoulder, shoved the cat off her lap, and got back to work as he passed over the phone.

~~*~~*~~

A few weeks after she left DC, Natasha discovered an email that had become trapped in her spam filter. The subject line promised that there was a cure for her (very common) erectile dysfunction, but when she opened the message, her heart skipped a beat.

_Give me a while to finish up here xoxo_

Natasha didn’t bother responding to the message, but she slept well that night.

~~*~~*~~

A week after that, Natasha spent a day and a half barricaded inside a Super 8 Motel outside of Denver, making another wall chart out of headshots, newspaper clippings, and red string. The outer circle consisted of her old identities, both SHIELD and KGB. The inner circle, to her dissatisfaction, wasn’t nearly as professional. Natasha could draw a straight line and a credible freehand map of Europe, but the “portraits” that she had drawn of potential new identities were little more than conglomerations of traits stuck on a piece of paper in a vaguely human shape, and instead of articles, she had a few pieces of paper taped around each drawing, full of the loopy writing that Maria Hill assured her was even more illegible than normal. (”I’m actually impressed, but you still need to recopy your field report in print or I promise I will bench you.”)

All things considered, Natasha thought that she had made some progress in creating new characters who she could enjoy being — or, if nothing else, had figured out who she definitely didn’t want to be. Rich yuppie, it seemed, was not in her future. Neither was a career as a sorority girl, no matter how sweet they all had been, because (a) Natasha didn’t like being hungover or living in a house with a lot of women her own age, and (b) even her Red-Room-enhanced body would age eventually, making any sort of party girl personality unsustainable in the long-term. Dominatrix might be a good set-up if she ever decided that she wanted to be a civilian with the ability to embarrass Captain America on a regular basis, but she felt more than a little slimy at the thought of revisiting that chapter of her career, no matter how secure the social scene was with regards to privacy issues.

On the other hand, being an aspiring musician had been loads of fun. There was no chance of becoming famous enough to cause issues with exposure, not with her limited vocal range and total inability to play anything besides the piano, but the acting — it was a combination of all of the self-importance of a politician’s wife and the naivete of an entry-level secretary. Plus she had gotten to wear a bunch of ridiculous cute outfits. That had been fun. The heckling from offstage had also been fun: Natasha wasn’t used to being so bad at something. Maybe she should take up the trumpet, next. If she hadn’t spent years hearing Clint’s stories about growing up with carnies, Natasha might have considered joining the circus — she’d make a mean acrobat, she’s sure of it — but she had heard his stories, and so she did not.

The problem, she concluded, was that on a spectrum of identities that went from “Black Widow” to “someone with absolutely nothing in common with Natasha”, the area too close to the Black Widow end was full of things Natasha either needed or wanted to leave behind; and the areas on the opposite ends, people she had never even known could exist, would involve leaving behind things that she didn’t want to. Natasha wasn’t interested in reinventing herself entirely, just … experimenting.

In the evening, she wandered down the road and into town for mediocre, overpriced sushi that she regretted as soon as she had eaten it. She ordered under the name of Renée Fuller, which had no connection to anything or anyone that she knew, and she was too tired to pretend that she was anything other than tired and hungry.

She got back to the motel and picked up her phone to call Clint, dialed, and then set it down again. “Give me a while to finish up” meant , and Natasha would not jeopardize another agent’s mission just because she was finally, finally having the identity issues that most agents her age had dealt with by now.

Instead, she filled out a postcard from the auto body shop in Arkansas that had replaced her turn signal, addressing it to “Dad” at the P.O. box that Nick Fury had given her. She dropped it off at the front desk and went back to glaring at the wall, thinking.

~~*~~*~~

Natasha was a legend in her profession. She had trained since the time that she could still count her age on her fingers to kill for the glory of her motherland. She had overcome brainwashing and genetic modification and torture, and she was currently unemployed because she had found the one sweet-faced honest farmer who actually tried to check with her background references before hiring her to sell apples.

Natasha packed her bags; ditched the wig and returned the overalls to their clothesline; and got the hell out of Dodge.

~~*~~*~~

It took a few more tries across two more states to find somewhere that was willing to pay her in cash and didn’t involve posing for pin-ups in someone’s poorly-lit garage. Natasha broke her next-to-last hundred dollar bill buying gas on the way to her twenty-seventh interview, but later that week, she got a call saying that her references had checked out, (thank you, Sam Wilson) and to come in for training at the Country Corner Cafe on Monday afternoon.

The identity she’d picked — Rebecca Jones, it didn’t get much more wholesome and WASP-y than that — was closer to her old ones than the last few (she didn’t expect to be able to bullshit a neuroscience degree long-term, too much work for no reason) but still far enough away that Natasha could build up the character without falling back on old habits. And saying she’d been a dancer meant that she could safely brag about having excellent balance while carrying uneven heavy loads.

Waitressing, Natasha thought, would be a safe way to get by for a while. She was young enough that no one would think it was odd if she stayed for half a year and then left for “the city” to make her way in the world. She’d have a fair number of people to witness her here in passing, and a few coworkers who wouldn’t think it was odd that they didn’t know about her home life in any great detail. Besides, she thought, she’d made a career out of pretending to be pleasant and interested in horrible people. The service industry wouldn’t be anything she couldn’t handle.

~~*~~*~~

Any new identity required practice, first. She usually worked out the kinks with Clint, or Coulson, or sometime Maria Hill when the woman actually had more than five minutes of down time; obviously that wasn’t an option this time, and she didn’t think that Steve would be too thrilled by the idea.

“Hi, I’m Becca,” she told Sam over the phone, voice half an octave higher than normal. “I’ve heard all about _you_. I think I’m in love with Steve Rogers. You know, Captain America? He’s sooooo dreamy. He saved my life, practically.”

“Hey Becca. You know, if that’s how you really feel, I’m probably not the person you should be telling that,” he said, sounding amused. “Where are you?”

“That’s classified information,” she cooed.

“Right, you’re a superspy. My bad. How’s that working out for you?”

“It’s okay, I guess. I gave my resume to, like, seventy places before one of them finally called me back. You?”

She heard a bitten-off sigh. “Back in DC for now.”

Natasha dropped her voice back to its normal range, shifting so that her weight was evenly distributed between her feet again. “I’m sorry.”

“Nah, don’t be. The way I see it, if the Winter Soldier is off HYDRA’s leash and laying so low that we can’t keep up with him, then the chances are lower that he’s not doing anything awful right now.”

Natasha nodded. “I’m not sure I agree with you, but I don’t have any concrete information that you don’t. If he turns up in Missouri, you’ll be the first to know about it.”

“Missouri, huh?” he said. “Good luck.”

~~*~~*~~

Natasha’s plans for this identity didn’t involve a lot of friends, but she did recognize that not having any personal connections would somewhat defeat the purpose of the exercise; so she did the requisite meaningless flirting with the head cook (who was forty and happily married) and made sympathetic noises when her coworkers grumbled about the coffeemaker being jammed. And of course, if she was friendly to people, they were going to make assumptions.

Natasha worked three days a week with a young woman named Jenna, for example, who elbowed her in order to remind her to check on any tables she’d been neglecting, and to go offer someone a refill, _you can see the dehydration in his eyes, Becca. In his eyes!_. Natasha resented her for about a week and a half before she realized that, mostly, she was irritated that this girl so soft around the edges could so consistently point out something that Natasha was doing wrong. 

Her irritation with herself, more than anything else, prompted her not to plead exhaustion or a lack of money when Jenna approached her after work and asked her if she wanted to go down the street to get beer once the cafe closed.

“I don’t think it’ll kill me,” Natasha said, even though one-on-one conversations involving alcohol weren’t part of her plan. If she ever needed to escape back here for a while, fitting back in would always be easier if she didn’t already have a specific mold carved out for her.

At the bar, Natasha ordered a brand of beer that she’d been assured was a local favorite; Jenna laughed when she nearly spit it out on first taste. 

“That bad? Really?”

“Nope. No, not at all,” Natasha lied.

“I swear I won’t be offended. It grows on you,” her companion assured her. Natasha had serious doubts, but she let Jenna tell her about her first experience with it; how, for prom, her older brother’s friends had bought them liquor from the store down on Elliott Street, just around the corner …

Natasha shook her head. “I just moved here a few weeks ago. I still haven’t figured out where most things are. Why don’t you tell me about it?” She leaned in a little, uncrossed her arms like nothing could be more interesting, absorbing the details and filing them away for future use.

“That’s about it, really. I hate it when people sit and lecture me about the best wood for hop beer, I’m not gonna make you sit through that on a first — time we see each other outside of work.”

Natasha caught the half-second trip over her word choice; however, it was easier to gain trust if people thought her unobservant, and so she pretended that she hadn’t heard. “I have a friend who’s a mechanic; he’ll talk your ear off about his machines even if you have no idea what he’s talking about. Trust me, you wouldn’t be as bad as him.”

~~*~~*~~

So she might have a coworker who thought they were friends, and who wanted Natasha to talk about herself. Natasha had dealt with worse. She spun her training into anecdotes about her first attempt at a revoltade that nearly twisted her ankle, and told Jenna that the knife scar on her arm was from a treacherous piece of scenery and a particularly clumsy dance partner. When Steve called her to inform her that he had met with Sharon for lunch, and it hadn’t been a disaster, Natasha didn’t even have to edit that much of their friendship out; just told Jenna that she had a friend who had finally decided he was ready to throw himself back into the dating game.

In return, Natasha learned about Jenna’s roommate and his ongoing battle with the mice in the walls, which Jenna called the Tottington family for reasons that Natasha didn’t care to understand. She did her best to give advice on how to make the best of a cramped apartment based on thirteen years of sharing a dormitory with thirty other girls.

“Handcuff them to the beds,” she suggested, when Jenna mentioned that one of her roommates had started to walk in her sleep, and Jenna gave her a sly grin that hit Natasha like the sudden warmth from a fireplace.

It was not, fortunately, a balancing act that she had to maintain every day. Most days, she kept to herself, came home feeling deep-fried and tired in a way that was different from the ache of being punched, or contorting herself into unnatural positions, or climbing along roof supports. She showered and made herself dinner, or scrounged something from one of the stores on the way home. She spent ninety minutes each day sifting through SHIELD data and passing on anything new about the Winter Soldier to Steve via a Stark phone guaranteed by both Ms. Potts and Mr. Stark to be safe from the NSA; and only then could she fall into the bright, chaotic dreams in which she was a country singer, a bounty hunter, a priest or — increasingly — just Rebecca Jones, dancing as her brothers in arms performed triple runs and tossed her into the air while she tried not to see her coworkers in the audience, applauding wildly.

~~*~~*~~

Three weeks into a fruitful career at the Country Corner, Natasha got off from a nine-hour early shift to discover that she has thirty seven new messages on her phone. She flipped it open, heart pounding. _Please don’t be aliens. I don’t want the world to end because I was fucking around at a minimum wage job in Missouri …_

Every single message came from the same number with an Iowa zip code, and every single message was the same:

>>>————>

Her heartbeat stayed high, but for a different reason now. She texts back, _$ n home?_

“Becca?” Her coworker loomed large in the doorway of the back room. Natasha slipped the phone into her pocket.

“I told Derek I was out two minutes ago. Did I miss something?” she asked.

“No, but you’re standing in the middle of the room and you’re looking a little cuckoo.”

Natasha hop-skipped to the side of the room and finished buttoning her skirt shut. “What do you mean?”

“Like my uncle when he’s hopped up on meth,” Lacey said.

Natasha blinked at her, considering how someone of Becca’s supposed background would respond. She would, Natasha decided, completely fail to recognize the insult. “My ex-boyfriend’s coming back to see me,” she said, with a bright smile.

Lacey snorted. “Good luck with that one, honey. Don’t forget to clean up before you walk out of here.” She made a dramatic exit, and Natasha was free to open her phone.

 _Sorta. You?_ Clint had said.

She picked up after herself, gathered her things, and waited until she reached the parking lot to reply. _Got a 9 – 5. [64076]. CCC._

The reply came while she was putting on her helmet. _Aw, T. I’m coming 4 u. when u wrk tmrw?_

 _6am - 3pm im becca,_ she told him, smiling.

_c u then x_

~~*~~*~~

True to his word, (and not even technically late) Clint waltzed in the door of the Country Corner Cafe forty minutes before Natasha’s shift finished. She jumped out from behind the counter before anyone else could reach him: one of the benefits of not being Natasha Romanova was that she could be occasionally overexcited, even if she wouldn’t let herself leap tables to do it.

“Good afternoon! How many today?” she asked Clint, keeping a sweet, charming smile fixed on her face as she skidded to a halt in front of him.

He gave Natasha a wry look. “Just me.”

“Great! Let me show you to your seat.” She studied him surreptitiously as she seated him and placed the least-stained menu in his hands. He looked tired and a little older than when she’d seen him last, but no broken bones or injuries so severe that he couldn’t hide them; and the threadbare Pilsner t-shirt and jeans blended right in with the rest of the customers. She’d seen him in civilian clothing plenty of times before this, but the effect was still jarring. “We’ve got two specials today: chicken and rice soup, and ratatouille. Do you want a few minutes to decide on drinks?”

“Uh…” said Clint.

“Ginger ale, great choice. I’ll be back in five minutes to take your order,” she said sweetly.

On the way back to the kitchen window, she touched Jenna’s arm. “My ex is at Table 6,” she hissed, smirking.

Jenna glanced over her shoulder, eyes lighting up. “ _Nice_. But, um, keep it professional, okay?”

Natasha struggled to figure out what she should do with her face. _My profession includes making people who know I want to kill them fall in love with me,_ she wanted to say. _Your cafe etiquette won’t be a problem._ She settled on a serene smile and an “I promise” as Jenna whisked herself out of sight with her tray of plates.

She did, in a strictly professional manner, keep an eye on Clint in between serving other tables (and in between her ongoing efforts to see how many dinner plates she could balance on one arm before it became hazardous; eight was her current record, but she’d seen the assistant manager do a dozen last time there was a party, and if a forty-year-old man could do it, then so could Natasha).He caught her watching and blew her a kiss that Natasha, as Becca, accepted by puckering her lips playfully and then pretending that she hadn’t seen him.

When she stepped outside after her shift ended, he was waiting on the hood of an ancient boat of a car. Natasha crossed the gravel parking lot and stood before him with her arms akimbo. “You don’t write, you don’t call, and you expect me to just drop everything and welcome you into my home?” she said.

“It sounds bad when you put it like that…” said Clint, scratching the side of his head.

Natasha grinned at the sheepish look on his face and dropped her bag so she could launch herself at him, hugging him hard. "You in one piece?"

He squeezed her tightly enough that she had to hold her breath, attempting to pick her up (she hooked a foot around his ankle until he stopped). "Yeah. I didn't get burned right away, so I figured I could finish the job.”

“And?”

“And then I got found out.”

Natasha glanced over her shoulder, caught sight of the dark sliver of Jenna’s face through the window, watching them behind the counter, and stepped back from Clint. “You’re giving me details when we get to my apartment,” she said. “Let’s go.”

~~*~~*~~

She was feeling generous enough to give him a tour of the apartment — all two rooms — before she dragged him into the bathroom to talk while she scrubbed the stale smell of cooking from her pores.

“Is it awkward to accidentally make eye contact with yourself while you’re on the toilet?” he asked when he saw the size of the bathroom, wedging himself into the small space between the seat and the sink. Natasha pulled the curtain shut and threw her work clothes over the curtain rod one by one, making sure to hit his head each time, rather than respond.

“Why is there a sweaty bra on my head?”

“It’s so everyone knows what a booby you are,” she said, grinning, and turned on the shower, shouting at him so he could pick up the sound of her voice over the background noise. He shouted back, weaving a harrowing — and almost definitely exaggerated — tale of mobsters chasing plutonium across state lines. Natasha felt a peculiar empty sensation in her chest as he caught her up on his exploits, like she was half an hour away from being too hungry to ignore it any longer. Halfway through rinsing the conditioner out of her hair, she realized what it was.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she muttered.

“What?” he asked.

Natasha gritted her teeth. “I’m getting nostalgic for missions together,” she admitted.

The edge of the curtain was pushed away from the wall, and his hand came through, tapping his fingers against the streaked tiles. “I knew you liked me,” he said.

Natasha rapped her knuckles against the back of his hand. “Don’t push it, Barton.”

~~*~~*~~

There were no mission reports and no reports to file, so Natasha wrapped herself in a light blanket against the nighttime chill and the cracks in the insulation and watched Clint reheat pizza from the night before. “Do you have a plan?” he asked.

Natasha shrugged. “Seeing how the dust settles.”

“Plenty of dust around here.” The microwave beeped. He pressed a few more buttons; it failed to start, and he poked it harder.

“I need my covers, Clint. You have to keep hitting the arrow button until the heat goes up.”

He frowned, leaning forwards like he was about to complain, and then decided not to. Natasha gave him a small smile. He nodded.

She offered him a corner of the blanket on the condition that if he got tomato sauce on it, she would stab him; and they curled up on the couch despite its disgruntled creaking.

“I got an offer from Stark,” he told her, once the pizza had been devoured in relative silence. “He ask you, too?”

“I put the team together.”

“Point.” He gave Natasha his plate. “You going? After the dust settles?”

She got up and made the short trip to the sink, did cleanup immediately because leaving evidence was sloppy and meals were no exception. “That depends,” she said. “I’m going to be here for a while in any case. You want to stick around?”

“I’ve got a trailer a few hours upstate,” he said. “No one’s gonna look for a crime-fighting millionaire in a trailer park, and Mrs. Freeman makes really good cookies. Feels like home.”

Natasha dried her hands. “Good. You can take me out to dinner next week.” No one was around except for the two of them; she did a flip over one of the kitchen chairs, heels tucked close to keep from grazing the low ceiling, and when she straightened in front of him, Clint was watching her with a delighted smile on his face.

~~*~~*~~

“Are we good enough friends that I can ask you what happened yesterday?” Jenna asked, as they walked from the bus stop to the movie theater. “Cause I’m nosy and I want to know, but I don’t want to be, like, obnoxiously nosy.”

Natasha tilted her head, eyes on the searing neon signs overhead. “We talked. I’m glad he’s back.” Too short, too abrupt. She dropped her shoulders and let her head roll back. “It’s a lot to process, you know?”

“Hm. You one of those relationships where you’re always breaking up and getting back together?”

Natasha snorted. “Not at all. We haven’t dated in nearly four years.” ( _”You were the director’s son at a performance I was in,” she had told Clint. “Or a stagehand. Take your pick.”_

 _“You’re enjoying yourself too much,” he’d responded._ )

Jenna patted her on the shoulder, and Natasha had a flash of something — an instinct from a lifetime of measuring people’s reactions to her, how she needed to alter her behavior to produce _this_ effect rather than _that._ She tucked her elbows closer against her sides. “I couldn’t be friends with anyone I’ve dated if my life depended on it. Nice idea in theory, but not for me, no sir,” said Jenna, pleasantly oblivious.

Natasha smiled, and seized the opportunity to redirect. “Go on…”

~~*~~*~~

Between managing to balance a dozen plates on her arms at once, making up stories about Steve and Sam to entertain Jenna, and being a tourist with Clint, Natasha managed to pass nearly a month without incident. Steve called her to let her know that he and Sam were on their way to Montana, and then again when she was at the store later that week to tell her that they hadn’t found him (he never said if he’s looking for the Winter Soldier or Bucky Barnes, and Natasha knew better than to ask) but they had found a Hydra camp — “like a boot camp from the war” — and a whole lot of dead Hydra agents. Natasha hummed in sympathy.

“We think he’s heading to Chicago — there were plans, maps at the camp — you want to come?” he asked.

Natasha considered the package of frozen pierogis in her hand, winced at the price, and put them back. “Steve,” she said, and stopped, suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of unreality that left her skin prickling and drowned out the background noise of the store with static. Hunting with the people she loved, or even with people she didn’t like but could respect — that was her mission. Grocery shopping at a supermarket in Missouri and helping old ladies reach the orange juice on the top shelf in between working at a cafe and carting plates suddenly felt like an alien endeavor.

“I’ll call you back,” she said, hung up the phone, and stared hard at the iced-over stacks of frozen dinners. The glass was frosted enough by condensation that she could barely see her reflection, misty and indistinct — not helping. Natasha hauled her groceries over to the metal counter of the meats section and stared at the warped image she found there until it stopped looking strange. _Rebecca_ , she repeated to herself. _Becca Jones, Average American._ She kept up the mantra in her head while she paid for her food, left the store, had put everything away in the kitchen area. Only when she was sure that she had settled herself back into her current identity did she call him back.

“I can’t right now,” she told him. “I’m supposed to be a reliable employee, I can’t take off suddenly.”

There was a long, long pause before Steve spoke. “All right,” he said. “Let me know if you change your mind.”

~~*~~*~~

“Hey,” said Jenna, once they were in the back room after the closing shift one night. “I’m meeting a couple of friends in the River Market this weekend. Wanna come with?”

Natasha would not love to meet a bunch of strangers in a strange town — one coworker was enough. “I’d love to, but I’ve got plans with Barney already. We’re going on a dinner date so that I can tell him why his life is a mess and he can try to convince me that I’m the one with the issues.”

“Yeah, I’m sure that’s what’s going down. Bring him along,” Jenna suggested. “Please? I told my friends I was going to invite you already.”

Natasha winced internally. “I’ll see, but I’m not going to make any promises, okay? That’s super sweet of you, though. Thanks.” And she gave Jenna a bubble-bright smile.

~~*~~*~~

“You don’t see any way this could go wrong? ‘Cause I’m not a genius, but I can see, like … how many people will be there?”

Natasha pressed her hands over her eyes. “Five.”

“I can see six ways this could go wrong.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

~~*~~*~~

The bar was small and dark and aggressively American in a way that had Natasha double-checking her exits and her backstory, staying close enough to Clint to brush against his shoulder with every step. They were hailed by Jenna and a group of plain-looking people, to whom Natasha was introduced in quick succession. Each one shook her hand, and they collectively assured her that Jenna had told them nothing but good things about her. Natasha gave them her brightest, most un-traumatized smile and let Clint introduce himself with an exaggerated Iowan accent that she hadn’t heard in years.

Dinner itself wasn’t anything special: they sat around a tall table with heavy food that started to make Natasha’s stomach turn about halfway through the meal. She laughed when required, and spoke when someone actively tried to engage her — more often than she would like, more often than she thought was normal. She communicated her discomfort with the levels of attention to Clint via a flicker of eyes and shifting her grip on her fork. He grinned and slapped her too hard on the shoulder.

“She hasn’t given you any shit about being uncultured swine out here, has she?” he asked. “Cause I got some stories for you…” and he launched himself into a drawling story that he appeared to have pulled completely from thin air; Natasha couldn’t even think of a possible shared memory or cover story. It seemed to work, though; he kept talking about her, and Jenna and her friends laughed when they were supposed to and ribbed Natasha about it afterward, and she hardly had to do anything. In spite of the atmosphere and the food, Natasha found herself, if not having the time of her life, then at least content.

~~*~~*~~

Despite the slight oddness of the night, things did manage to go back to normal after that — for a given value of normal in Natasha’s life, anyway. Balanced, she thought, might be a better word. Two weeks slipped by without anything to mark the time that had passed besides her expanding list of files on Hydra, and the occasional texts from Sam, Steve, and — once — Tony Stark, who wanted to know what type of ropes course she wanted on her floor of the Tower.

 _Not right now,_ she reminded him.

~~*~~*~~

She mentioned to Jenna that Clint would be back in town, and did she want to show them around the city like she had mentioned before, and Jenna gave her a funny look and said, “Actually, I was just going to ask if you wanted to take a walk later. It’s been a while since we talked.”

Something in her phrasing gave Natasha pause, but it wasn’t not the sort of thing that Becca picked up on or would worry about if she did, so Natasha gave her a thumbs-up and a bright grin. “Nothing I’d rather do.”

Once they were at the park, however, Jenna’s expression grew serious, and she leaned forwards on her elbows. “Can I ask you something?” she said.

“Of course,” said Natasha, although her stomach twisted with anticipation. They were highly visible in the park, but between the trees and the fences, she thought there were enough obstacles to trip up her companion if she had to flee. Plenty around to use as a weapon — branches, dirt, dog leashes — if it came to that. She doubted it would, but …

“Your friend, Barney, you called him,” she said.

Natasha smiled pleasantly. “Yep. What about him?”

Jenna took her arm and directed her to a bench under a tree with large white flower petals dripping from the branches. She did not meet Natasha’s gaze. “I don’t really know how to … god, this is so awkward.” In a rush, she said, “Are you sure he’s who he says he is? You really met at a ballet?”

Natasha blinked at her a couple of times, letting the smile fade slowly (and completely naturally) from her face. “Yes… why? Is something the matter?”

She observed the changes on her coworker’s face: confusion, then smoothing over the frown and setting her jaw. Natasha had encountered this before, dealt with this before, and despite the progress she had made on not being only herself, she felt the scene slipping away — 

_Be distant. Be calm. Admit to nothing without a plan to neutralize the threat and contain the information_.

“Dave — you met him a few weeks ago when we went to Kansas City — he’s into some weird… conspiracy theory shit, I guess. Most of it’s stupid, it’s pretty funny when he brings it up, but …”

 _Shut up_ , Natasha told the cold voice in the back of her head. “But?” she asked.

“There were pictures. Articles.” Jenna took a deep breath, clearly bracing herself against the arm of the bench, watching Natasha closely. “That was Hawkeye, wasn’t it? _The_ Hawkeye.”

Natasha pressed her lips together. _Say something. “No? What are you talking about? He has a brother, an older brother, that’s really what he does. That’s really who he is. Look him up.”_

“He’s a friend,” she said, instead of anything useful.

Jenna opened her purse, dug around inside it until she pulled out a printed news article. Natasha’s own face stared up at her — cheekbones more visible, red-headed, precisely applied makeup pixelated by a low-quality printer. “That’s what he figured. Is that you?” Jenna asked.

Natasha looked up, met her hard, frightened gaze. She reached out to take the article; when Jenna snatched it back, she folded her hands in her lap and feigned calm. “It was.”


	3. early summer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Natasha meets dogs and some children, but doesn't kiss babies

“Why?” Jenna asked her. “Is there something going on here?”

“No. You’re safe right now. Did your friends tell anyone besides you, do you know?” Natasha dropped the pretense of — of otherness, of not being fundamentally an assassin — and curled herself into a crouch from which it would be easier to jump and gain momentum quickly.

“I don’t know. I don’t think they really thought — like, this is Missouri. We don’t have robots falling from the sky or evil corporations secretly running the town; just the same shit as everywhere else. It’s like meeting a celebrity at Walmart.” She covered her mouth, eyes wide — hyperventilating.

Natasha placed a hand on her shoulder, telegraphing her movements so that Jenna would have time to flinch away if she wanted. She didn’t seem to notice. “Jenna. Hey, look at me.” Natasha gave her a small smile, pretended that it was nothing more than the sort of simple reassurance she would give whenever things got particularly hectic at work or someone was more demanding than normal. “Breathe. It’s okay. There’s nothing here.”

“But why are you here?” The paper crumpled under the pressure from her hands forming fists. “Why are you — what’s going on?”

“Personal business. Believe me: there’s nothing interesting about your town, not to the sort of people I fight.” Natasha glanced around at the park, mostly empty, populated by dog-walkers and a few families with small children. When she looked back, Jenna’s gaze was fixed on her again. “What? You’ve never gone to a party and hidden in the bathroom for a few minutes?” she asked, and then thought back over the history of their interactions. “No, probably not.”

“Oh my god, you know me. The fucking Black Widow knows — what. Okay. So this is, like, vacation for you? Turn traitor, then pretend you’re a waitress? Just for funsies? ”

Natasha pursed her lips. “I needed the money. Really. And I like it here,” she admitted grudgingly. “Are you planning to tell anyone, or not?”

~~*~~*~~

She called Clint later, while she was packing up the scant belongings that she had acquired during her months in Odessa. “I got burned,” she said. “Or, let me rephrase that, we got burned. I shouldn’t have let you near me.” It had been stupid, careless. She had just wanted to be — what? Nice? Polite? Stupid.

“You okay?” Clint asked. 

“Yeah. Just civilians. I’ve contained the situation and I’m on my way out.” She grabbed the hair straightener and dye from the bathroom, left her towels where they were.

“The ones you wanted me to meet?”

“I made a mistake.”

Clint was silent as she scoured the bedroom for any stray clothing she liked enough to keep. Natasha was about to ask whether he was still there when he spoke again. “I’m sorry about that.”

“I’ve suffered worse.”

“Don’t mean it can’t be rough.”

Natasha hissed into the receiver at him.

“Fine, fine. I’ll stop pretending you have feelings. You want me to come with? I got a drug dealer out in Omaha who’s giving me shit, but I can come along once I’ve knocked him and his buddies down a couple of pegs…”

“That depends. I’ll keep you updated on where I go. Still thinking … finished thinking. West,” she decided. “You know any good hotels in Puente Antiguo?”

~~*~~*~~

Clear roads and her own restlessness conspired to bring Natasha to the lab at nine thirty the night before she had told Thor to expect her. To her relief (though not surprise) the lights were still on. She parked the motorcycle under the walkway roof and knocked on the door. No one answered. She knocked again. She shook out her hair and pulled it straight back into a bun, a soothing motion that she had given up on trying to train out of herself.

The door opened, and she let her hair fall back around her face. The old man, Erik Selvig, blinked at her. “I remember you,” he said.

“Dr. Selvig. It’s good to see you again,” she said, shaking his hand. “Is Thor here?”

Dr. Selvig furrowed his brow at the door frame like it had answers. “No, he went out to pick up dinner. He should be back soon.”

“Do you mind if I wait here?” she asked.

“You saved me from Loki and his madness. The least I could do is let you borrow the couch,” he said. “Come in, come in.”

The lab lacked the chrome and size of Stark’s basement, but Natasha was impressed all the same. One wall was mostly white boards full of scientific notation and diagrams that she could only partially make out. A couch sagged against another wall with a human-shaped bundle of blankets burrowed into it, and a set of computers and monitors framed a small woman wearing the ugliest sweater that Natasha had seen anyone wear unironically.

Dr. Selvig cleared his throat. “It’s one of Thor’s friends.”

“…plus the distribution of electrons over the secondary field counterbalanced against positively charged hydrogen ions results in a net shift with respect to the r axis…” said the woman in front of the monitors, raising her voice and holding up a hand.

Natasha nodded at Dr. Selvig. “I’ll wait,” she murmured. She leaned against the edge of the couch, arms wrapped around herself, and studied the whiteboard closest to her.

~~*~~*~~

Thor arrived at the lab with plastic bags of takeout that he set down as soon as he saw Natasha. “My friend,” he greeted her, clasping her forearms. “I did not expect to see you here so soon. Was your journey a pleasant one?”

“I’m still alive.” Natasha returned the gesture, suppressing a giggle at how little of his arms she covered with her own hands. “You’re holding up all right out here?”

“As well as can be expected,” he said, and smiled. “I regret to tell you that I did not include you in my estimations for supper, but I am confident that the larder is not as barren as Jane would make it out to be.”

Natasha turned to Dr. Foster, lips pursed and eyebrows raised. 

Dr. Foster gave Thor a fond, exasperated look. “We’ve got ramen and peanut butter, but we can share with you. You want to show her where it is?”

Thor offered his arm to Natasha. “Lady Natasha.”

“Prince Thor,” she said, and allowed him to show her to the lab’s kitchen.

~~*~~*~~

To be honest, Natasha expected life in New Mexico to be a little more exciting. She’d met plenty of researchers before and knew that their level of excitement usually corresponded directly to how close they were to hacking a set of data into statistical significance, but she’d also met Thor. She had thought that he might be a better model for a successful balancing act.

“Is this what you do every day?” she asked him, leaning on the counter in the corner of the apartment that passed for a kitchen. “This”, as far as Natasha had been able to make out from the last week, included washing dishes with unsettling intensity, drinking merrily with the local biker gang, and pacing around the lab reading books with titles like Contemplative Lessons From Black Holes and A People’s History of the United States while Jane Foster and Erik Selvig talked at each other and occasionally asked him to come over and talk science with them, too.

Thor tucked his elbows in to avoid knocking anything over as he turned around. “Is this not what you were expecting when you asked to observe an ordinary life?”

Natasha shrugged. “I’m just surprised at how well it seems to suit you.”

He studied her as he dried a frying pan. “And yet you do not think it suits you.”

Natasha looked around until she found another towel shoved into a cabinet. She reached around Thor to pick up a plate, giving herself time to think. “It’s … isolated,” she said finally. Even offering to go out, run errands for the lab, she didn’t see nearly as many people as she had at the diner, or wandering the roads and picking up acquaintances for a few days at a time. She wondered whether to articulate this to him, how she would do that, and decided to save it until Sam got back from whatever part of the world he and Steve had run off to that didn’t have cell phone coverage. “Where do the plates go?”

Thor reached across the kitchen area to indicate an empty shelf. “Was that a metaphor? I know that you are like … one of my childhood companions. He did not always feel comfortable speaking plainly.”

Natasha hummed under her breath. “Sometimes a plate is just a plate.” She picked up a handful of forks. “I’ll keep that in mind, though.”

~~*~~*~~

It took Natasha three days to notice that Thor went missing at a quarter to seven every evening of the week. The first day, she brushed it off; the second, she had buried herself in her laptop to further her ever-elusive goal of sifting through all of SHIELD’s many terabytes of data, and so the time between five and nine at night showed up as nothing more than a keyboard and an abstract map of interconnected files in her memory.

The third night that she accompanied Drs. Foster and Selvig to the laboratory, she ran across three references to a “gauntlet” that SHIELD didn’t seem to know much about; but she knew who might. She looked up, assessed her environment, and blinked. “Why isn’t Thor here?” she asked aloud.

Dr. Foster didn’t answer her, too busy whispering numbers to herself as she worked. Her assistant, Darcy, pulled herself away from her own computer and spun around in her chair. “He’s walking dogs.”

Natasha tilted her head, studying her posture and tone of voice. “I’m almost sure that you’re serious,” she concluded aloud.

“Damn straight. Jane’s space prince wants to contribute to society.” Darcy snorted. “Like saving the planet from aliens wasn’t enough.”

Natasha gave her the requisite amused smile. “Maybe he’s afraid that Mjölnir won’t find him worthy anymore if he doesn’t keep up the good work.”

“And he’s got to pay the rent. Boy doesn’t get capitalism, but he knows he’s got to work off all that food somehow,” Darcy said. “Also, do you have time to go over these readouts with me? My intern’s sister is getting married or something, and I want to double-check to make sure these are actually outliers before I bother Jane again…” 

~~*~~*~~

When Thor started to pack up his things the next day, Natasha got up, mirroring his motions. He looked at her, a puzzled frown on his face. “Mind if I join you?” she asked.

For a moment, she thought that he might refuse; but he looked her up and down, apparently concluded that she was serious, and nodded.

Natasha half-expected him to be off on a secret mission of some sort, regardless of what Darcy thought, and she followed him curiously. They walked down the street and turned off into a residential neighborhood. Thor knocked at one of half a dozen brown one-story buildings in a row with four maguey plants and a very dead tree in the front yard. The door was opened by an old woman, who handed over a few dollars and a white dog that came up to his knees.

“You actually are walking dogs,” she said. “I wasn’t sure whether that was a cover story for something else.”

Thor actually looked a little offended at that. “I would not lie to Jane, nor, by extension, to her companions. I simply enjoy the company of the animals, and it is useful to their keepers.”

Natasha raised her hands. “All right then. What’s next?”

They passed from house to house in the neighborhood until Natasha was driven from his side by a pack of animals — mostly mutts and an overexcited hairless dog that was the cutest ugly animal Natasha had seen since Maria Hill’s shelter cat — all of whom clearly adored Thor. He wrapped their leashes around his hands and nodded at Natasha.

“We’re going to run. Are you prepared?”

Natasha had never been asked that question under quite these circumstances before. “Sure, why not?” she said with a shrug.

Thor grinned.

They raced around and down the quiet streets as the sun fell from the sky and into Natasha’s eyes. She hadn’t neglected her training since she’d left DC, but that didn’t negate the world of difference between doing her own routines for stamina and flexibility, and chasing after an ancient alien prince and half a dozen dogs trying to outpace him in the heat of the New Mexico summer. This had nothing to do with training — this was just fun for them, she thought. Not so much for herself, but the mad unnecessary rush clearly held great appeal for her companion, who laughed and looked over his shoulder to make sure that neither she nor the small terrier had fallen behind.

She raised an eyebrow at him. As if.

They ran perhaps a mile, give or take, until Thor signaled with an upraised fist to slow down. To the dogs, he barked out an order — no, he just plain _barked_ , Natasha realized with delight.

“Water,” he said, pointing. “Over there.”

‘Over there’ described a lemonade stand set up on a plastic table covered by a sheet and shaded by an umbrella at the end of a driveway, staffed by two children with identical jawlines and dark eyes. The youngest saw them approaching, jogging with panting dogs in tow, and poked her sister, giggling. The elder girl pulled away from her hand, obviously trying to maintain the image of a serious businesswoman. Thor flashed a smile at Natasha.

“Sit,” he told the dogs, and, bowing to the children, “my ladies.”

“What can we get for you today sir,” rattled off the younger child, cadence suggesting she had memorized the line without learning the meaning of individual words.

“My companions would like their usual water. I myself would be delighted by some of your lemonade. Lady Natasha?”

Natasha took this as her cue to step forwards and quit lurking. “Hit me with your best,” she said.

The older girl gave her a shy smile. “Are you an alien, too?” she asked. She shook the container of lemonade and elbowed her sister, who dove under the table and reappeared with three beat-up metal bowls.

“Hm, no,” Natasha said, giving Thor an amused look. “I’m just a regular human like you.”

“And yet she is a brave warrior and a true companion in battle.” Thor straightened up from petting one of the dogs, placing a hot hand on Natasha’s shoulder.

The older girl gave them both plastic cups already sweating condensation. Natasha sipped carefully, and was pleasantly surprised when her mouth did not try to turn itself inside out at the taste. “This is good,” she said.

Thor beamed as he placed three dollars down on the table.

“Can you fly?” asked the younger sister, having finished setting out water for the dogs. “I saw _him_ fly, and Iron Man can fly, and Captain America can fly…”

“Captain America can’t fly,” Natasha corrected her. “He just has very good friends who will catch him when he falls.”

“Oh.” She looked disappointed for a moment. “I want to fly. That would be so cool!”

Natasha leaned down, giving her a smile that didn’t have too many teeth. “Me too,” she confessed. “Now I just get my friends to throw me in the air. Which is … not something you should try right now. Wait until you have grown-up friends like this one.” She patted Thor on the chest.

Once she, Thor, and the dogs, had rested, Thor directed them back, through a slower and more circuitous route. Natasha kept her silence: she was there to observe, after all, and so she observed. They passed houses with people visible through the windows, or sitting in lawn chairs just inside their open garages. Thor made a point of waving to most of the people who saw them, reminding Natasha that he, unlike her, was well accustomed to living a life observed. It showed in the way that he held himself when he saw that he was being watched: arm raised in a well-worn gesture and smile somehow both practiced and natural. Clearly royalty, even with sweat-damp hair curling at the base of his neck and a tank top from Target. Natasha tried imitating his movements: back straight, chin just short of parallel to the ground, arms loose at his sides unless he needed to rein in the dogs. Just an alien who had saved the world and lived in a small town where, apparently, most people knew his name. “Mister Thor!” called a stocky man who was sweeping dust from his front walk. “My amigo, how are you?”

“Very well, my friend,” said Thor. “We dine together in two days, do you recall?”

Natasha tilted her head at him once they turned the corner. “Friend?”

Thor paused a moment to swat the hairless dog lightly on the side and growl at him. “Stay with us,” he reminded him. “Yes, I — I am afraid that I did some mild damage to Jane’s car several months ago. Mr. Perez helped me make the repairs.”

“Interesting,” Natasha said, and nothing more.

~~*~~*~~

Natasha was pleased that her muscles weren’t stiff the next day, that she could keep herself in proper condition without a mission to keep her active and practicing. Not that she had any doubts, but still: good to know. It put her in a good mood as she rolled off the couch, folded her blankets over the back, and stretched before joining Darcy and Dr. Foster — both on their way to, but not quite, awake — in the kitchen.

“Morning,” she said with a nod in their direction.

“Did you have fun?” asked Darcy. “I meant to ask you, like, hours ago. But then I was asleep.”

“Hm?”

“Yesterday, with Thor.” She hunched over the large mug of coffee and the most recent edition of _People_.

Natasha squeezed past her to get to the orange juice in the fridge. “He really did take seven dogs for a walk.”

“What, you think I’d lie to you?”

“You? No.”

“He comes back every evening with dog hair all over his clothes. Kind of hard to miss,” Darcy informed her.

Natasha nodded. “I’m more of a cat person, but yes, I enjoyed myself.”

She had to partially unpack the fridge in order to reach the juice. Dr. Foster muttered to Darcy while her back was turned, followed by the scraping of chair legs and shuffling noises. When she turned around, Darcy was resting her chin on her hand and studying Natasha while chewing a large bite of bagel. Natasha pretended to ignore her scrutiny. It was good practice, she told herself. Just your average off-mission assassin, having a normal breakfast before going about a normal day in which no one died.

“Can I ask a personal question?” Darcy asked.

“I guarantee no answers,” said Natasha. She continued to forage for food that wasn’t primarily meat- or sugar-based, until she found a bunch of bananas that were only a little mushier than she would have preferred. “Besides, most of my personal history is online.”

“Saw that. I’d say it sucks, but everyone says you did it to yourself, so … whatever. You do a lot of beating people up, right?”

“I’m trying to get past that,” Natasha reminded her.

“That’s a bummer. You think you can show me how?”

Natasha stared at her. “Why?”

“What if aliens kidnap Jane again? Or me? I’m a weakling, look at me.” Darcy flapped her arms for emphasis. “Jane’s smart enough to harness the power of quantum physics to do her bidding, and Thor is an _actual space god_ and I have my tasers but, like. An army. Also creepy dudes. I can’t taser them or I’ll get arrested again.” She made a face that drew a short, sharp laugh out of Natasha in spite of herself.

She considered it while she ate. Darcy had a point; the world was changing. She’d already been an accessory to … whatever went down in London; and more would come. 

n the other hand, Natasha had started training in a body that was both smaller and sturdier than Darcy Lewis. She wasn’t sure it would translate all that well. 

When she voiced her concerns aloud, taking care to be very neutral on exactly how old she had been, Darcy waved her hand. “Or not, it’s whatever. I just figured, Black Widow is camping in my apartment, I should take advantage…”

Natasha cocked her head. “Would you consider it rent?” she asked. “Believe it or not, waiting tables doesn’t pay very well long-term…” 

Darcy grinned. “I might be convinced.”

~~*~~*~~

Finding space, once they had agreed on it, wasn’t difficult: the entire city was flat and largely devoid of both undergrowth and large boulders, and Darcy pointed them in the direction of the local park. “There’s a cute guy there who goes jogging in the mornings. Maybe he’ll see us and come over?”

“Is that why you wanted me to show you how to kill a man?” Natasha asked.

Thor frowned. “There will be no killing of anyone here today.”

Darcy thumped him on the chest. “Don’t worry about it, big guy. Most I’ll be doing is bruising my fists on your pecs.”

“Dr. Foster didn’t want to come?” Natasha asked him.

He shook his head. “Jane does not concern herself with the ways of the warrior. She is a fine scholar, and that is enough.”

Darcy shrugged. “Her loss.”

The plan, as far as one existed, was for Natasha to use Thor to show Darcy how to fight against someone larger than her. The reality involved finding a rock-free part of the park, checking around for dog poop before they started practicing falling down, and then ten or fifteen minutes of Natasha showing Darcy how to maintain a proper stance without losing form every time she shifted her weight, and shushing Thor when he tried to give his own advice.

“You’re wonderful as a sparring partner, and as a running partner. This isn’t going to work if you don’t let me do this my way,” Natasha told him. “Your way is good, but you’re just going to confuse her.”

“I’m easily confused,” Darcy agreed cheerfully.

To Darcy’s obvious disappointment, her jogger did not join them that first day, nor any of the subsequent days in which they practiced — despite Darcy pointing him out halfway through a set of straight punches that Natasha was showing her how to dodge.

“Focus! Joggers come and go. Death is forever.” Natasha tapped her on the side of the head.

Darcy turned back to her with a rueful twist of her lips. She threw a punch; Natasha caught her wrist and pushed it to the side, forcing Darcy’s body into the way of Natasha’s knee. “Ow,” said Darcy. “Sorry.”

“I’m being nice. Watch me with Thor.” Natasha arranged Thor in front of her like a very large mannequin and repeated the movements, slow enough that Darcy could follow along and then mimic them. She wouldn’t survive a week in the Red Room, Natasha thought, but then, very few people had. She had to remind herself that that wasn’t the point.

After an hour or so of back-and-forth between the three of them, they packed themselves into a very old pickup truck that the project had acquired in addition to the camper — Natasha thought that it might technically belong to Thor, but no one had claimed ownership thus far — and drove to the lab to meet Drs. Foster and Selvig for the day. Darcy’s intern, once he returned from California, spoke very little to Natasha except to ask her what she wanted for lunch. Once Ian returned with food, they spent an hour sitting on the roof, coated in sunscreen, and then went back to work. Most days, Thor would leave the lab a little before seven to collect dogs and run them around town; often, if Natasha wasn’t in the middle of reading anything too complicated, she would join him.

“This is my friend, Natasha,” Thor said, the first time that one of the dogs’ owners looked at her oddly. 

“I don’t touch the dogs unless they want me to pet them,” Natasha assured her. “I’m just along for the ride.”

“You’re one of Thor’s friends in New York City, aren’t you?” the woman said, pushing her glasses up her nose with one wrinkly finger. “You’re smaller than you looked on the television.”

Natasha stared at her. “I wasn’t standing next to a demigod at the time,” she said, and the woman gave her a satisfied nod before letting her mutt shove past her to leap on Thor.

So there was that. And when they returned to the apartment building after walking the dogs, there was dinner, which Dr. Foster sometimes attempted to cook. Occasionally, if that attempt failed, Natasha would climb the stairs to the even smaller apartment that Dr. Selvig and Intern Ian shared, and took some of their dinner in exchange for arranging the common areas into cleanliness — or, at least, livability — with military precision. At night, she went to sleep on the couch in the downstairs apartment, all of her belongings stored in the bookshelves or under the couch or in the two inches of kitchen cabinet where no one appeared to have noticed that she had wedged a false back on the second day of her stay. 

Sometimes, she dreamed about waiting tables.

~~*~~*~~

Natasha acquired her second and third students on a Saturday, about a week and a half after she started ‘training’ Darcy, and she maintained that it was mainly because she was too startled to say no. Darcy’s jogger may not have noticed them, but someone else did: a middle-aged woman with a boy in tow who looked to be about ten. Natasha grabbed Thor by the shoulders and swept his feet out from under him; as he went down obligingly, she saw the two of them stopped on the perimeter path of the park, trying to pretend that they weren’t watching.

“Were you paying attention to my footwork? Step up before you try to hook his ankle,” she said to Darcy, eyes on the watching pair. “It’s a little slower, but you’re more likely to break his bones instead of your own.”

Thor accepted her hand as he got to his feet and positioned himself in front of Darcy again, pretending to growl. Darcy snapped her teeth at him, then glanced at Natasha and dropped the expression. “Okay, sorry. Here goes.”

A few minutes later, the woman and her son started edging closer to them; Natasha gave them a nod, and the boy grew a little bolder. 

Natasha loosened her stance, put on a soft not-quite-smile as they approached. “Hello.”

“My son wanted to say hi. He’s a big fan of you,” the woman said to Thor.

Thor bowed to them. “My pleasure. I was merely helping my sister-in-arms and my friend.” He indicated Natasha and Darcy. Darcy waved at the boy with a slightly manic smile.

“Oh?” said the woman.

Natasha stepped forwards, although it made her feel exposed and uneasy. “Our friend pointed out that this town has seen more than its fair share of alien violence. I have some experience not being taken hostage by aliens and offered to help.”

The boy turned around and flapped a hand at his mother. “She knows about the aliens! I did a report on aliens in school,” he told Natasha. “People used to believe that they didn’t exist, or that they did but it was impossible to find them, because they’re lightyears away from us, but now everyone’s seen pictures and videos of aliens, because they came down and attacked New York! But I don’t remember why… what was it?” He frowned, gnawing on a thumbnail. Natasha raised an eyebrow at Thor; he gave her a barely-perceptible shrug.

“I’m sorry.” The woman gave an embarrassed laugh. “Do I know you? You look familiar…”

“I’ve been on the news a couple of times the last few years,” Natasha admitted. She hesitated for a fraction of a second before she held out her hand. “Natalia Romanova. My friends call me Natasha.”

The boy swatted at his mother’s hand a couple of times. “Mom. _Mom_.”

A bubble of pleasant warmth made its way up through Natasha’s chest. “You can watch us, if you want. Just stay back.”

She turned her attention back to Darcy and Thor, and did her best to forget about their observers, until she noticed the mother mimicking the motions of a wrist lock, hands at her sides. Natasha said nothing, but her mind worked while she had Darcy break free of Thor’s grasp, over and over again. Darcy was a civilian — a prior acquaintance, the friend of a comrade whose moral judgment Natasha generally thought to be sound — but, overall, no more special than Danica the drunk sorority girl in Memphis, or Jenna in Odessa. She was startlingly enthusiastic about learning how to take a punch, and (perhaps) had a better grasp of the reality of Natasha’s life than many other people, but that was it.

Natasha made a decision as she let Darcy stop to get water. She nodded at the woman and the boy who still hovered under a nearby ash tree. “We do this on Monday and Thursday, too,” Natasha told them. “Same time. Whichever part of the park has the most shade. If you want.”

The boy’s eyes grew wide. “That’s so cool. _Mom._ ”

His mother studied Natasha, eyes flickering between her and Thor, huge and golden and a relatively well-known quantity in Puente Antiguo. Natasha dropped her shoulders, flexed her hands, let her posture loosen.

“We’ll talk about it,” the woman said to her son. “Thank you, Ms. Romanova. Thor.” She hesitated. “Thor’s friend.”

“Darcy,” Darcy called after them as they walked away. "Sheesh.”


	4. late summer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Natasha accidentally-on-purpose starts a friendly neighborhood self-defense squad

When Natasha was nine years old, she spent long hours in school and even longer hours in a freezing outdoor compound, practicing her rolling jumps off of the backs of the older girls who were training to be as immovable as possible, still as marble, still as the ice beneath their feet. When Natasha was nine years old, one of her classmates fell, overshot her landing and landed awkwardly on the back of another classmate’s neck. Their teachers made them gather around and take note of what her classmate (nameless, in her memory) had done incorrectly. Then Natasha was called forwards. As a reward for her own acceptable performance, she was permitted to snap her classmate’s little finger flat against the back of her hand.

Groups of girls still tended to make Natasha uneasy, not that she would ever admit to it. It helped that this group had formed gradually, only met a few hours a week, and was only mostly girls. Not all were children, either: their parents stuck around, enough of them participating that they could help her corral the three teenagers, nine children (or ten, or eight, or twelve, depending on the day and the heat and how crowded the community swimming pool had gotten) and one Darcy into some sort of order. The days when Thor helped her were easier — people tended to gravitate towards his authority — but sometimes, she had to make do with other friends. 

“If a bad man pulls a knife on you, what’s the first thing you should try to do?” she shouted across the group of them in the park. “Yes — Carmen!”

“Run!” screamed the small blonde girl. 

Natasha couldn’t tell whether her face was red with exertion or heat, or possibly the instantaneous sunburn with which Natasha herself was so familiar. She paced around the group towards Carmen in order to better assess the situation. “And what do you do if you can’t run?” she continued. “Sal, show me on Clint.”

Sal eyed Clint nervously as he dropped down out of the cypress tree in which he had perched to observe. Clint took a small sprig of the tree with him and thrust it forwards, going slowly. Natasha watched with narrowed eyes, reached out to echo the boy’s stance and demonstrate exactly how he was going to sprain his wrist if he tried to move like that. “Go on, try again — he’s not going to break, I promise.”

“Where’s Mister Thor?” asked the younger of the two sisters who had sold Natasha and Thor lemonade the first week she’d been in town.

Natasha crouched down in front of her. “Do you know where Roswell is?” she asked.

Eliza nodded. “My granny lives there.”

“Good. There’s a UFO in Roswell, and Thor’s gone to make sure that everyone is okay, including your granny. He’ll be back soon and we can get rid of this bozo.” Natasha looked up and raised her voice. “Hey — in the back, I see you! Play nice or go home.”

~~*~~*~~

At 17:01 Mountain Time on July 10th, Natasha read the last words of the last document in the last folder of high-level SHIELD data that she had dumped on the internet several months before. A prickle of energy ran down her spine and out into her limbs as she closed the file. She tagged the document; sorted it into the correct location in her personal archival system; ran backup to her external hard drive; closed her laptop; and walked out of the lab. Once free of the atmosphere of intense productivity, Natasha shook out her limbs and broke into a dead run, not stopping until her sides started to ache.

Then she hitched a ride back to the lab. Ian stared at her as she waltzed back in, sweaty and drained and feeling lighter than when she had left. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“Just peachy,” she said, and grinned.

~~*~~*~~

“Natasha! You got mail,” Jane said. In amongst the bills and flyers, she plucked out a glittery pink envelope and handed it to Natasha with a bemused glance, briefly considering it before dropping the problem and moving on to the next one. Natasha slid her finger under the flap and pulled out a similarly pink sheet of cardstock. **It’s somebody’s birthday!** it proclaimed in glitter-covered letters. The verso contained a few more lines: Eliza Gutierrez, two weeks from the date, “presents optional”, along with a phone number to which she was instructed to RSVP.

Natasha stared down at the invitation for several seconds, but the type didn’t change, nor did the glitter become less of an eyesore. She crossed the apartment to knock on the door of Thor and Jane’s bedroom, eyes hardly leaving the paper.

Thor opened the door in a tank top and shorts that left very little to the imagination. Natasha thrust the card at him. “You’re royalty, you’re used to handling this sort of thing.”

He scrubbed at his eyes. “Do you wish to attend, or to decline the invitation?”

“Decline.” No need to surround herself with small children and confused adults quite yet. Natasha did not believe in baby steps, but she did believe in gradual immersion. “Preferably without upsetting a small child in the process.”

Thor nodded, accepted this without question, relieving her of a tension she hadn’t even noticed. “You understand that my knowledge of Midgardian etiquette is not precise.”

“If your advice sounds faulty, I’ll ask Ms. Potts.” She smiled at him. “Thank you.”

“You need only ask,” he said, clasping her shoulder.

~~*~~*~~

Tony Stark visited personally towards the end of July. To be specific (which Natasha preferred to be in all of her iterations) he flew over in a suit of armor that Natasha hadn’t seen before, and landed outside of the lab just before dinnertime. Darcy’s intern Ian looked up with an expression of awe on his face; Darcy gave him a shove towards the door with instructions to “make yourself useful, but be cool about it.”

The armor was off and packed away in briefcase form by the time Stark came into Natasha’s line of vision. Ian kept making abortive motions towards the briefcase, as though wondering whether to offer to carry it. “You couldn’t have called ahead?” Natasha asked. “Or had JARVIS call ahead for you?”

“Actually … he did. I forgot,” Jane confessed from her work station.

“Thank you,” said Stark. “Anyway, do the two of you have a minute?” He pointed between Thor and Natasha.

“Think you can handle the star charts until we’re done here?” Natasha asked Ian.

He gaped for a moment before apparently remembering how to speak. “Yeah, I got it covered. Uh. The roof is free if you three want some privacy.”

~~*~~*~~

“I’m not saying you have to move to New York, although, may I remind you: rent-controlled apartments with a spectacular view of all the buildings that the Chitauri destroyed last year. I’m just saying that a show of solidarity would be useful.” Stark spread his hands to demonstrate his sincerity and innocence, although the effect was marred rather by the lasers in the palms of the suit.

“Neither of us would argue such a thing,” Thor said. “I agree that while the travel would take a great deal of time, the principle is a good one. But this place is a point of contact between the realms, and I would be here to see through the research that Jane and Dr. Selvig have been conducting on its mechanics.”

“I’m not especially interested in the quantum mechanics of the Einstein-Rosen Bridge. I do have obligations. I can’t leave right now,” Natasha told him.

“Obligations, what obligations? You demonstrably saved millions of American lives, anyone who says you owe them anything is unpatriotic,” Stark responded immediately.

She raised an eyebrow.

“I’m not saying you owe me anything. I’m saying you owe _yourself_ ,”— 

“I’m running a training program through to the end of August,” Natasha interrupted him.

“Are you teaching? I’m having trouble imagining that. It’s like picturing Pepper going camping.”

Natasha shrugged. “It’s a work in progress.”

“She has improved,” said Thor, and she punched him in the arm without looking.

“Dr. Foster’s assistant wanted to learn self-defense. I let a few interested civilians join us. It snowballed and I let it,” Natasha explained.

Stark made a curious face at her, as though she had started speaking Italian and he was struggling to adapt to this new development. “Why?”

“Why not?”

He opened his mouth, clearly about to argue, and then — miracle of miracles — thought better of it. “I can’t argue with that logic. I would add, though, that your buddy Hawkeye is already camped out just below the penthouse in the Avengers Tower. Along with the Jolly Green Giant. Just in case the charming company of either of those two was incentive to come hang out. We have awesome movie nights.”

“Our movie nights are satisfactory,” Thor said. “I will continue to discuss the matter with my Jane.”

“Stark Industries continues to offer very generous research grants,” —

“And Jane continues to have problems accepting money from those who are not also scholars or rulers,” Thor reminded him. (Natasha cocked her head a little at his word choice.)

“We’ll consider it. I’m not going anywhere until I’ve done what I said I would do here,” Natasha said.

“That’s fair. It pains me to say it, but I can’t actually condemn you for being an upright citizen instead of sneaking around stabbing people with syringes — no, I’m never letting that go.” Stark jabbed a finger in her direction. 

Natasha smirked, because Tony Stark was the kind of person who begged for people to smirk at him, and she had the background to be the sort of person who obliged. “You’re surprisingly ungrateful about that.”

“I know. Anyway, speaking of ungrateful, I came all this way, taking up a considerable amount of time just to see your beautiful faces, only to be rejected.”

“You’re sure that you’re not just trying out a new model of the suit?” Natasha nodded at the armor still locked in place around him.

Stark grinned at her. “Side benefit. The long-distance cooling system is working really well, in case you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Will you stay to dine with us, then?” Thor asked him. “There are few places which prepare food of the quality to which you are accustomed, but I do not doubt we can find something to satisfy you.”

He shook his head. “Nah. You’re not my only targets. Your fellow mutineers are driving to Sacramento as we speak, I figure I can catch up with them before they make it into downtown. What do you want to bet?”

~~*~~*~~

When she and Thor made it back inside, Jane and Erik were packing up their bags, Darcy was cleaning out the coffee maker, and Ian was pretending that he hadn’t just been leaning against the window for a better view of Stark taking off in the Iron Man suit. Natasha let Thor do the talking in favor of packing her things and sending Steve a message.

_gonna have im for company. prepare to explain your ws-related road trips._

_extended honeymoon_ he responded almost immediately. _he can’t prove anything didn’t happen_

_wow it really is a slippery slope_

_?_

_1st its 2 men, next day its 1 man 1 artifact_

Thor’s enormous booted feet appeared in Natasha’s field of vision. She looked up. He dangled a set of car keys in front of her. “You have been elected to operate the glorious horseless chariot Ford. We await you.”

Natasha bit back a groan. “Dammit. I forgot we took the pickup today.”

“It is glorious and an honor worthy of a warrior such as yourself,” Thor said.

She tilted her head back until she could appreciate just how badly-contained his amusement was. “It’s a piece of crap and even you know it. I’m coming, I just…” Her phone rang. When she looked down, she was treated to a close-up photograph of Captain America’s middle finger, with a blurry background the color of his old uniform. Natasha pocketed her phone and snatched the keys from Thor’s hand. “Yep, I’m done here. Let’s go home.”

~~*~~*~~

Natasha let Ian help her into the cab of the pickup truck, because the boy’s stubborn insistence on treating her like someone who couldn’t kill him with a good kick hadn’t quite become boring yet. She watched over her shoulder as he settled in next to Darcy against the wheel well, computers tucked in the space between them. The whole vehicle shifted on its axels as Thor climbed into the pickup bed along with Erik and stretched out his legs. Jane and several heavy books occupied the seat next to Natasha. Once Natasha was sure that no one was about to fall out, she started the pickup in a cloud of engine smoke that reminded her that just because they didn’t _need_ the pickup like they needed the van didn’t mean that someone shouldn’t take it to Mr. Perez the mechanic for an inspection.

Jane opened the back window to continue a conversation with Thor that involved a lot of giggling and drawing invisible diagrams in the clammy night air. Natasha met his gaze in the rear view mirror, smiled, and pulled out of the parking lot.

END


End file.
